Botox for the Résumé:
One Woman's Image Makeover

By

Christina Binkley

Updated June 26, 2008 11:59 p.m. ET

At age 49, Lisa Johnson Mandell found her career "kind of sputtering." After 20-plus years as an entertainment broadcaster and film reviewer, she began to see jobs she applied for going to people she knew were younger. "I kept thinking, 'There has got to be someone out there who will value my experience,'" she says.

New Yorkers weigh in on whether dressing younger makes one more marketable in the job market. WSJ's Elva Ramirez reports. (June 26)

Her husband, Jim Mandell, president of a Hollywood voiceover agency, told her frankly, "People are rejecting you out of hand because you are too old."

The competition for jobs can seem age-biased in our youth-obsessed culture. Today's economic slump has hit just as legions of new college graduates reach the job market. Employers are eager to fill their offices with youthful energy and technological savvy, as well as the openness to new ideas that also makes 18- to 34-year-olds so tantalizing to advertisers. Our culture is so spellbound by youth that even some people in their early 40s think they've aged out of the fast lane and feel pressure to remove the years surgically.

But is employers' apparent preference for youth really about wrinkles? Or do companies simply want workers who keep pace with the times?

Many mature job candidates rest on their laurels and fail to create a modern image, says Maxine Martens, chief executive of the executive-recruitment agency Martens & Heads in New York. Looking young isn't the key: Attitude and knowledge of today's world are just as important. "It's your job to stay contemporary," she tells candidates. Ms. Martens, who is 60, founded her company after being fired from a recruiting job at age 54. She sometimes sends candidates to her hairstylist for an updated style, but she also suggests they try new gigs as fearlessly as they did in the past.

Vote & Discuss

Does looking younger make you more marketable? Should older job candidates make an effort to learn "young" technologies, build websites, or dress younger to get jobs? Share your thoughts.

Mr. Mandell, 60, concedes that his advice to his wife came from his own biases at his agency. "I unfortunately believe that I am of the same mind-set that most other people are -- that younger is better," he says.

This came as a shock to Ms. Johnson Mandell, a bubbly extrovert. "Who would ever dream that '20-plus years of experience' would be a liability?" she said earlier this year, referring to a selling point typed at the top of her r&eacute;sum&eacute;. "These are strange times."

Yet she resisted the urge to turn to surgery or cosmetic procedures and started eliminating the age lines from her job search instead. On her r&eacute;sum&eacute;, she removed the 1980 date of her summa-cum-laude college graduation and deleted some early jobs.

Removing early jobs and dates is ethical, says Wendy Enelow, an executive-career consultant. She says she often removes early jobs from the r&eacute;sum&eacute;s of candidates in their late 40s, focusing on their past 10 to 15 years of experience.

To show she's as hip to new media as her 20-something rivals, Ms. Johnson Mandell launched a video-blog site, LisaLiveinHollywood.com, with the help of a young Web designer she found on CraigsList. She loaded the site with her film reviews and celebrity interviews to illustrate her Hollywood access without focusing on the two decades it took to build. She concedes the Web site drove little traffic except for the kind that really mattered: Her new r&eacute;sum&eacute; directed employers to her Web site rather than a street address.

When her husband suggested she hire a stylist and photographer to shoot photos of her, Ms. Johnson Mandell asked a 20-something friend to come over and root through her closet for a handful of young-looking outfits. Ms. Johnson Mandell wound up with at least one that she would never have chosen herself: a studded T-shirt and jeans. She refers to the set of photos jokingly as her "mother-daughter" looks. The T-shirt and jeans are the "daughter" look, while a shot in a sleek black turtleneck is the "mother."

ENLARGE

Ms. Johnson got a better response from employers after changes such as a new résumé and photos of her in youthful clothes.

She put a photo on her r&eacute;sum&eacute; -- choosing different looks for different employers -- and placed several on her Web site. She didn't airbrush the photos. "That's all me there," she says.

Responses to her new r&eacute;sum&eacute; hit within a week. Bill Pasha, vice president of programming for radio-station network Entercom Communications Corp., called about a position contributing to morning shows on 15 radio stations. Digital Publishing Corp. called to discuss creating an entertainment-related Web site.

Once the doors opened, Ms. Johnson Mandell says, age seemed less of an issue. Several months ago, she signed on with Digital Publishing for a salary, stock options, and a percentage of ad revenue in the brand-new site, Filmazing.com.

Rob Garretson, Digital Publishing's 49-year-old vice president of editorial, says he had assumed a young person would run the Web site, but Ms. Johnson Mandell "demonstrated all the energy and enthusiasm" that made age irrelevant. She also signed with Entercom and says she expects her total compensation from both jobs to be well into "six figures." When I asked Mr. Pasha how old Ms. Johnson Mandell is, he replied, "I have no idea."

She also sent new r&eacute;sum&eacute;s to four companies that hadn't responded to her old one. This time, they called. She says, "It was with such pleasure that I told them, 'Thanks for the call, but I'm really tied up right now.'"

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